"Sorry for replying late, but I'm the new head of competitions at Games Solutions and wanted to clarify the situation of dropping Quakelive as one of our games at the ESWC 2011 event.

ESWC picks it games based on different factors. One of these factors are numbers(mostly generated by the community itself). For example numbers of people subscribing to our website for a certain game, numbers of attendees at previous events, numbers of players/spectators and this year none of our partners showed interest to host a Quakelive qualification. All these numbers and many other factors are taken into account when picking a game. This year we gotten to a point that Quake wasn't viable anymore. The numbers couldn't back up us picking Quakelive. Whether we love the game or not. Dropping Quakelive also has nothing to do with picking up Counter-Strike:Source.

We do understand the disappointment in the community but I think Carmac explained the situation surrounding Quakelive perfectly in his interview
with derQuaker.com.

I hope in the future we'll see a new spark in the FPS duel community which will enable us to pick it up again. Remember to register at the website next season to make sure your game gets a chance of getting picked. It does matters.

it's all about audience. People get exited watching girls play games, and because pro girl teams have no chance against pro guys teams, they have to create 2 divisions. I also find it ridiculous, but here's the explanation...

there are a lot of other things. For example, women are better suited for multitasking.. You can't really see who's better until we have a big talent pool of both men and women. And on average men will always be ahead just because of their competitiveness, anyway..

watch the skill level of the best female team, and then compare it to one of the top10 male teams. it'd be a rape.
nothing interesting to watch for the spectators, some guys beating girls at a shooting game.

us = United states players. i forgot i'm not allowed to speak for that playerbase despite having played more games than any of you. lol. Yes go ahead, you know it better. Do tell me how it is on U.S servers then....

don't bother please, you're just going to make a fool of yourself if you claim otherwise. It's dead on U.S servers dude. I know you don't want to agree with "ME", but at least agree with "IT", the facts as stated.

Yeah, but I get it, it takes a lot of time and dedication to get on par with the pros, while the odds of winning any significant amount of money is very low for new competitors... I'm afraid duel is doomed :( too bad they didn't pick up tdm though.

oh wait yeah ofc Quake and cod are the same...
just like soccer and basketball are the same.....
its both played with a ball, but that doesn't make them the same. Just like quake and cod are both with guns, but still they are completely different.

I don't have any direct links, but I've been watching GSL since Open Season 1. In interviews with the Korean professional players it's been mentioned many times that the Korean professional players know next-to-nothing about foreign tournaments, let alone the Korean fanbase. This has been progressively changing over the life of sc2 as Korean's are increasingly included in foreign events, but even in recent gsl seasons players such as boxer and cella (SlayerS coach) have mentioned that foreign tournaments are still relatively unpopular in Korea due to language barriers and Korean sc2 sites generally ignoring coverage of foreign events.

With the MLG exchange program and more foreign tournaments featuring Korean players I think this will change over time.

From my personal experience, I hardly watched any of the DH sc2, but still watched the league finals. GSL is still pretty far ahead of any foreign run tournaments both in production value and in player skill and is almost always on, which is more than enough starcraft for me. On a side note, this past MLG was AWESOME, no stream problems, multiple streams going and a far greater overall production value than the past tournaments, so hopefully that helps set the bar higher for foreign sc2 tournaments/leagues

from everything i know of sc2 community koreans know about foriegner tournaments and are slowly warming up to them but bw is still much bigger than sc2 in korea and koreans dont really watch tournaments in the middle of the night.

Quake Live and other fps duel games have been the only esports games I've had constant interest in following. Mostly it's been various flavors of Quake. I've tried watching the other stuff but it just doesn't seem all that interesting to spectate SC2 or CS.

So now there'll be nothing comparable in the foreseeable future and QL seems to be on the way out? Fuck.

I think I see a lot less of esports-watching in my future. Oh well, It's been a good run. Great personalities, nailbiting games and it's lasted for quite a few years now. I just wish eSports would get over this "need to change to new games all the time to please the sponsors" mentality. No game will ever get big with that in effect.

quake 3 is so inaccessibly. a new players (or someone coming back) first needs to pirate the game, patch it, then download mod + maps and then hope to somehow find a public servers for his skill level. while one can simply go to quakelive.com and play. and the things that are really holding back ql to grow are not there in q3 aswell...

i am not saying that q3 has no advantages over ql, but i highly doubt that it would be good for the community to move back now

well i couldnt easily obtain it (and the german scene isnt small) and a lot of people still dont like to use steam but okay, most people can buy it if they want to.
but that doesnt really change my argument, ql is still way more accessible and features that could actually make competitive quake a lot bigger are not going to happen with q3 either. (like ladders or getting casual players into esports via embedding news/streams, advertisement)

Well, this entire argument is stupid because since 2007 or so, you had to go BUY a game at a store, not online. Quake 4 did okay, and Quake 3 had a huge community. Manual patches, nothing centralized.

wtf?
lets have a look at this, yes a lot of people bought quake 4 but most of those sales were because it was a new single player game and the online community shrinked down to a a small core very fast as vanilla q4 mp was crap and good mods + user made maps could not keep a big amount of players.

quake 3 was 10 years ago, what makes you think it would still work nowadays? those years changed how the market works. free to play is huge nowadays and simply the way to go if you dont have impressive graphics and/or a single player part.

we need this new generation of players that wont touch a modded quake 3 that you have to buy first.

and you have a point there. I'm not a quake 3 player as in I didn't really play quake 3 online. I do have the game and a license key but then I need to find the right patches, mods, maps, to join the servers so I kinda gave up and only played quake3 against bots. Quakelive at least is easy to go and play for any new comer. You don't need to go and search on the web for the latest patch, mods, maps, and so on.

u didnt believe me and other said quake never die but tbh i think they gonna bring ql back in toruneys when ppl gonna realise lol is boring same story as wow and yes im sad cosue quake is droped i can play any game quake is in my blood if im not play quake i watch every tourney.

At this point you CANT feel bad about this decisions - It is ALL about money

What IAM thinking about right now is BUILDING some kind of Quakers Association, which can in connection to famous players from community and set up serial of tournaments. This might be somehow connected to id Software?

Why?

A) id Software can hardly support free game such as Quake Live with this count of players and we can hardly expect any further promotion of Quake Live

B) We are missing some major stuff, that can attract all players, that are playing Quake Live, but have NO IDEA about CyberSport level of gaming ( Example: Direct Announcing to players playing QL about streams and events )

C) We ourselfs can build up serial of tournaments without any need of direct support from ESWC, ESL with finals at QuakeCon

dude what you're proposing has been said a million times since 2008. You're wasting your time. In the end, id has to promote the game and after 3 years, you would be a complete moron to think anything is going to change now. Id has no marketing team dude, thats' so beyond obvious even a blind caveman can see it.

Quake is Quake, basically a game for hardcore players only - thus the small community that we have. It's too hard to start, it takes too much time/dedication to get decent, its environment is too unfriendly (console, hud, cfgs) for new players, it's quite old, it's known to most of pc gamers as tweaked Q3 since for them it's basically Quake 3 in a browser. It doesn't have shiny graphics or super-user-friendly features. It takes much skill (time) to be good/decent not like in other new games where the learning curve is quite short. It's not like CS or SC where it's easy to learn-hard-to-master. It's not easy to learn at all, generally speaking. It's not a game for casual gamer, and casual gamers are esports target these days I guess.

Numbers is what dictates today's esports (major) games, and sadly Quake is no where near the numbers a good title should have - both in players base and stream numbers.

The community is unhealthy as well. I mean for instance we have 1vs1 tourneys every few days and you can't even full fill 32/64 bracket even though there are like 5x more people playing the game at that time. People are afraid to participate/compete in tournaments because they have no chance of winning a match or getting even to the 2nd/3rd round. While that's probably true in most cases, this makes Quake look bad in every way for further potential tournament organizers. MLG sees that's QL ladder is huge fail = people have no interest in the game, so why should we host a tournament? And it goes so on. In Starcraft every tournament has 256-512-1024 players without problems and most of players are just meat for the rest, still they try to compete.

And you shouldn't bash Carmac because only thanks to him we've seen Quake in IEM in the first place. Without him we wouldn't have any IEM Quake tournaments.

To make it short: you can learn a lot about the game (strategy/tactics/build orders) by not even touching the game itself. You can prepare for various scenarios by proper build orders - hard part is executing them well and having good micro/macro at the same time. It's a lot easier and as vedic said more fun than in Quake. You actually won't be raped in the first seconds/mins of the game, you fight for survival (at least against better players) but eventually at some point you'll lose badly. However you aren't fucked from the first second of the game, while in Quake it takes about ~1 min to take an advantage over inferior player. In SC you can cheese, prepare, surprise - you CAN win vs a better player while in Quake you hardly will be able to do that.

I hear that. As someone who was completely and totally new to RTS games in general, my friend tried to show me the "basics" of SC2. Now I consider myself an otherwise intelligent individual, but I honestly had no clue what I was supposed to be doing, or what was going on. VERY unfriendly to RTS newcomers. I feel like the RTS genre in general already had such a large fanbase that SC2 was secured a huge following just by coming out (not to mention the marketing campaign behind it, which was awesome). Definitely not something you can easily pick up and learn, but if you're already used to RTS games and know how to play them, then it was probably a seamless and exciting transition. But you're right, it's not "easy to learn" for a newbie.

The thing is, in SC2 there are always tons of newbie people just like you (most likely much more than whole QL player base), and you can play anytime with them and slowly learn without overwhelming yourself.

I won easy my 1st game on it playing against a friend who had finished the game with all races. Prior to that, I hadn't even touch the game. He just spend 5-10 mins explaining few basic things to me in order to be able to play it. If that is not easy, then what is it? I don't think that anything close to that could ever happen in q3, ql or any other quake.

i guess i have a skewed view of sc2. im yet to actually play an actual game on it. i played the sp for a bit and then was generally trying to get the basic skills down but then shit came up so i decided to put it off (cos i know that if i get started ill get addicted and play it for 5 hours a day).

but i have to disagree when u say sc2 has an easier learning curve and that surviving for 5-10 mins before losing makes a big difference. i dont think either is true. it easily has as hard a learning curve as q3 if you want to get any good at it. also about the surviving for 5-10 mins, dunno about others but i would feel pissed if i keep wasting 10 mins doing fuck all only to lose. that to me would be a lot more frustrating than getting raped by rapha in ql.

i think both games are equally difficult to pickup, if you look at the game alone. the difference is what happens on the peripheries. its not hard to find videos and articles galore explaining every single aspect of sc2. for starters u dont even have to look much beyond day9 dailies. the other thing is that the concept of sc2 just gained so much momentum. its the viral advertising thing that id just couldnt handle properly. i feel like the popularity of games depends so much on the initial momentum u gain through advertising. once u gain a little bit of inertia a lot of things just happen on their own, like people contributing content etc. i honestly think a dm game like quake could take off just as successfully as quake if they actually managed the advertising correctly.

anyways end /rant.

ps: o actually just wanted to add one more thing. when comparing the 2 games u sort of also have to factor in the advantages that quake does have over sc2, starting with the pure visceral aspect of the concept of death match gaming. pretty sure lots of people would find the first person experience a lot more engaging than rts.

also about the surviving for 5-10 mins, dunno about others but i would feel pissed if i keep wasting 10 mins doing fuck all only to lose.

You aren't doing "fuck all" - you are learning to micro/macro, you are learning to scout, you are learning how to use information, and you are learning efficiency. You can't move on in the game until you have a foundation, and getting good at handling your base is EXTREMELY important.

thats sort of my point tho. i mean in a quake game, even if im getting raped if i get a single awesome shot in it makes it all worthwhile. maybe its just me but i wouldnt feel the same way about sc. its a little harder to think o i got raped but atleast until the 7 min mark my game was going the way i wanted it to and feel good about it.

ps: just so u know i dont dislike sc. i love it and i havent even played a game yet. :). i suspect ill start playing after i come back from my summer trip and then just go nuts playing it. o wells.

haha that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. sc2 is SO easy to learn. all you need to do is watch replays and literally mimic build orders and strategy click for click. where as in just aabout any other game (e.g. quake) just because you watch rapha's demos doesnt mean you have move like him or dodge like him.

sc2 just takes repetition, which is like the easiest way to learn anything. where as other games require much more.

Okay, so you're willing to watch a few replays of a good player, and then play against him? Watching replays does not make you a pro, but if you think that's the case - by all means, go beat everyone at MLG.

He didn't say he could be top level, but copying builds off of replays is common and a good way to practice. It's much more difficult to get the same kind of practice -> result by watching a demo of a top quake live player.

He said that it's easy to learn. Watching a replay teaches you very little about actually playing the game. It's not as easy as just stealing build orders, since a build order is just meant to be the driving force of the actual gameplay. If you don't have strategy, and if you can't micro/macro, the build order does not matter.

let me know when uve watched all the top pros play, then managed to copy their build orders and then go on to win a major sc2 tournament.

super logical argument there. the only valid part of it was that sc2 actually has a readily identifiable concept like the build order that u could latch on to when watching a replay. but arguing that copying build orders lets u instantly get better at the game is pretty lol. also while watching raphas demos wont let me instantly beat him, it often does let me get my game better. the only difference is that what u need to look for in demos is not as obvious as build orders. but for anyone halfway intelligent its not that hard to figure out what to look for either.

im not arguing that sc2 is massively difficult to pickup compared to quake. im just saying its not massively easy to pick up either. not if u want to get any good at it. i think both skill curves are fairly similar. my comment was simply a response to "sc2 is easy to pick up, hard to master". and i was making a comparison to quake and implying u COULD say the same about quake if u think the basics of quake are just u go pick weapons up and shoot people.

I don't think the learning curve has much to do with the success of the game, it's more so the hype around it. I imagine they have a huge marketing campaign around SC2 and the graphics are gorgeous while also being able to run on a lower end PC if necessary.

There are a HUGE number of resources to quickly improve like replays, web sites, streams with commentary, forums and of course the Day9 dailies. It has a HUGE player base so the match making system works well compared to a game with a small player base like QL. Both games are generally easy to jump in to with B.Net for SC2 and the web site for QL, although B.Net is way more polished and appealing. The newness of it also can't hurt, since sponsors are more likely to back a new game then one built on 11 year old technology.

I just think when you add up everything it works better as a whole on a commercial level. It sucks that QL is the red-headed stepchild of E-Sports, but having played SC2 I can see how it appeals to a broad audience and why its so success in E-Sports.

i agree with you. i think my initial post said the same thing. in fact i was making the point that sc2s success really debunks the myth that the learning curve is a big negative factor when it comes to games becoming popular. they key is to get that advertising campaign and getting the game to go viral. after that it just takes a life of its own.

the learning curve is somewhat relative though. what I mean by this is that no matter what your skill level is, you will have a much easier time finding that in sc2 then you would in a game like quake live- where the community is almost non-exsistent compared to a game like sc2 and finding someone that is as good as yhou (or as bad as you) is a lot more challenging than a game like sc2 would be.

oh- and without responding to everything that has been posted since my post... me and socrates broke the top 200 in the north america for 2v2 sc2 teams (out of about 10,000 ranked diamond teams) in about 3 months of playing the game- this is without any prior sc or games of the sort experience. we did this from 6/10-9/10. we did this by watching replays and copying build orders and strategies as well as some practice to get our apm's to a respectable 100-150 level (without spamming of course).

so w0nk0 please go find me any example of 2 people accomplishing such a thing in a game that is as complicated as quake- you won't as it has never nor will it ever happen.

you are absolutely right and I wasnt trying to brag, just stating that it was possible for us to climb the competitive ladder (and wether you want to admit it or not most of the top american 1v1 players also play 2v2 for fun) and become better than average at it within a few months. that is not something you can do in quake.

this is like a sad epenis contest. i mean sad even for an epenis contest. so im not going to bite. but i dont think its that hard for a motivated player to become quite well above average in quake if he spends time watching demos and working to improve his game in 3 months. certainly not to reach the equivalent of "top 200 in 2v2" sc2. and the other aspect of this is i dont think the learning curve applies to people like us who decide ok im going to get good at this game and then spend 5 hours a day properly working towards that goal.

anyway we've beaten this argument around enough i think. also can i say fu for ruining that pickup yday.

it's not an epenis contest it's just facts, i doubt there is anyone who is at the highest tier (yes lol) of duel in QL who also plays sc2 and isn't in a high league (diamond/masters) - even with no RTS experience

Should i say it in german so your miniscule brain gets it? I didn't say it takes 3 months to learn to strafe jump..... i was trying to explain that IF someone hasn't learned how to rocket jump/strafe jump before then it will take them longer to adapt. Movement is key in ql. Without movement, even with aim, you're a sitting duck. Btw: stalk my posts much?

care to elaborate on how the main aspects of, let's say quake (aim, timing, movement), aren't easily practiced just by repetition?

And while you're at it, also elaborate on why watching quake demos isn't as beneficial as watching sc2 replays? Yea, won't make you an coollersque dodger just by watching, so what? You watch some sc2 replays and then all of a sudden you roflstomp your next opponent with boxer micro?

The big problem with quake is actually not the game itself but its community. It's small, unwelcoming to anyone (and anything) new, and full of people who like to see themselfes as some kind of prodigy because they're playing quake. That is what always held quake back, not some super hard learning curve.

After reading up on this whole sc2 blurb I think there's another element that's kind of been overlooked. While sc2 is an incredibly difficult game to master it is actually much simpler to learn than a large portion of other rts games out there. Only 2 resources, and a food count, there's not a million different units available, only 3 races, etc etc etc. The mechanics can be manipulated and strategized to create an infinitely high level of play, but the basic elements of the game are actually relatively easy to pick up compared to other games in the genre...for example back when age of empires used to be played, the basic mechanics of that game are a lot more difficult to get a grasp on than sc2 imo.. it's not a more skilled game, sc2 is just easier to learn.

The best comparison I can think of in another genre of game would be street fighter. Easy basic mechanics and any two people can pick up and play to have fun, but the game becomes incredibly complex if you're playing against someone who has mastered all of the mechanics.

I think the same concept could be applied to quake, but it hasn't for a variety of reasons brought up in this thread and over the years. You really can't even just join into a deathmatch server and do well. There's relatively decent players in all the game modes and even the 'baddies' will be a lot more skilled than a new player; and this is the same thing I hear from countless people that I've tried to get into quake. Sc2 has a shit-ton of mods and custom games that basically anyone can play without knowing anything about rts as well.

well the reason why matchmaking works in sc is the same reason why u cant join a quake server and have a good game if ur a newb. its the numbers. u can only have good matchmaking across all skill levels if u have a certain critical mass of players which quake just doesnt i think.

SC2 has AMAZING ladders, where every single player ends up with a close to 50% win rate, since he's always pitted against similar opponents. This way you constantly improve, but you also win to keep your momentum up.

The community is unhealthy as well. I mean for instance we have 1vs1 tourneys every few days and you can't even full fill 32/64 bracket even though there are like 5x more people playing the game at that time. People are afraid to participate/compete in tournaments because they have no chance of winning a match or getting even to the 2nd/3rd round. While that's probably true in most cases, this makes Quake look bad in every way for further potential tournament organizers. MLG sees that's QL ladder is huge fail = people have no interest in the game, so why should we host a tournament? And it goes so on. In Starcraft every tournament has 256-512-1024 players without problems and most of players are just meat for the rest, still they try to compete.

do they use seeds in sc2. I really don't know. But in ql we use in order to make sure that the precious good players won’t play early and that noobs will get crashed and be out in 1st round. If we weren’t using seeds more players would have participated, knowing that a lucky draw might give them few good games. Of course, some ppl would had whined, since we r really pro at it and since ql is serious business.

yea I agree with the ego thing. That was one of my thoughts too actually. This seed thing is also part of the ego. Serious business as I wrote. I was playing competitive pool and they never use seeds and many times they even use handicap in order to attract players. They MUST do it, otherwise they would have so little participation that won’t be worthy having a tournament. The seeds might seem like a small thing, but is part of the ego thing and surely holds tourneys back.

i sort of agree with this but before u talk about tournaments and whats wrong with them dont u have to consider why we need tournaments at all. why should the casual player be bothered with tournaments. why do we not have leagues and ladders? o wait i know why. xD

I have to agree. I didn't even bother entering the everyone must die tournaments because I knew that all the top players who have been playing for 10 years would rape me like 30-0. Am I afraid to lose? No. But do I want to enter a tournament where I feel like I have a shot, at the very least to make it to the second round? Yes.

Basically Quake Live is q3 v1.1 though it has been "developed" for 5 years? It should be atleast q3 v2.0 to have any kind of success.. just compare quake live to other free shooters out there, including w:et, tf2 etc... its a fucking piece of crap compared to those when it comes to how easy it is to hook in game...

and now, if we really want Quake to be one of the major multiplayer fps-titles again we really need Quake 5 with newest id software engine and cpm / q4 physics to make it more attractive for newbs...

Also ID should think how to make more newbfriendly deathmatch / duel so that it will be more attracting to the people, ie making it roundbased and about first kills or something like that

toxjq said quite well in some interview "in quake live u have to be so extremely precise about ur movement or you can lose even to newbs, while in q4 you could just pay laidback game against newbs and win"

Making it more aim and movement heavy will probably just increase the number of spectators who will never play the game(a small percentage) while decreasing the number of actual players, because if what you're saying is true qw and cpm would have 100x the playerbase that they have now. So the way to go would be dumbing it down even further. That or we can stop dismissing any game we haven't spent 5 years on in a second and l2p something else.

It could be good if it had any kind of scene, for me its quite nobrainer whether i play duel or tdm, since i am not going to wait for a matchup for hours.. When I wanna play, I REALLY WANNA PLAY instead of waiting..

huge delays + octoshape shit streams + duel only, I wont miss that much. Looking forward to real lans like ugc #2 instead. I don't care about that handful nerds who want to make a living out of playing quake. There are enough skilled players who play for fun, fame and dedication.

QL needs more lans for the people and not only for the top 10 duellers. 10 people playing duel on a lan while 1k viewers spam braindead shit on #lvl^ and I watch some laggy shit stream which I even paid for (sold to me as HD..). That's my IEM experience. Give me a lan with 400 players instead, open tournaments as well as big finals for the pros. DH tdm was a nice start but I doubt that lans will ever become as popular as 10 years ago, or even close to.

Yer, they were amazing quality. But the actual content delivered very poorly, which equals a massive turn off. The coverage for the 1v1 final was pure pain, absolutely awful. Not knocking the physocal quality of the stream delivered, just the actual content from the casters.

At IEM you had to buy an esl tv ticket to get "hq" streams. The resolution was fine but the codec totally failed on fast movements. I ended up watching the lq streams too, but they were far away from the usual levelup quality if I recall correctly.

Why does quake need a pro circuit? How about people just play it for the love of the game, it's still the very best death match game going. Fuck the realistic games!

Having said that when I win euro millions I'm going to have a 2 million euro world tour every 6 months until my cash runs out featuring QL duel and tdm. Also with side tourneys of cpm 1v1 and tdm and qw 1v1 and tdm.

It's just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long, the grasshopper kept burying acorns for winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. But then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns. Also he got a race car. Is any of this getting through to you?

The only glimpse of hope is that id software apparently have some money that they are willing to put into tournaments(?).
While the IEM is nice etc, I guess if they would for instance just buff the dreamhack prize money and help stremy organize some more events with decent prize money it would not make a significant difference and might actually be for the best (you often hear about esl not paying out prizes...)

But it's really on idsoftware to act now. No competition = dead game = no subscription money. I don't know how much they earn from quake live but if it is enough to sponsor some tournaments they have no choice but do it.

I don't blame Carmack actually, I've been a "quaker" for 10 years but if I try to put myself in his shoes, I' would probably have done the same.

I know that when something is going wrong we always try to find someone responsible, but in this case, ID IS THE ONLY ONE TO BLAME and nothing will change my mind.

Quake might have a small community but it's a skilled one, an active one. Think about it if you compare Quakes to CS or SC, It's quake players who have made Quakes (1, 2 and 3) what they were. They developped the game way more than CS ou SC players develloped their own game.

And what has ID done ? They restart Quake3 from day 1 and locked everything the players had developped before. And what else ? They make those players wait years, and finnally pay, to give them back what they already had instead of focusing on ways to make quake bigger, more attractive to new comers. Honnestly, I dont know how they could possibly have done a worst job.

I dont need some inside news to guess that ID will probably advertise for some new stuff in order to make people pay another year. I surely won't and strongly believe that the number of signups will be smaller than past year. Its only a matter of month before they completly stop to support the game. Let's take bets here, I dont think you'll be able to log in quakelive.com in 2013.

"Quake might have a small community but it's a skilled one, an active one. Think about it if you compare Quakes to CS or SC, It's quake players who have made Quakes (1, 2 and 3) what they were. They developped the game way more than CS ou SC players develloped their own game."

Well, how many of these people are left in the community? All I see is a lot of whining players that barely do anything constructive and make the job for the dev team harder than it already is.

most of those helpful people got discouraged when id completely ignored them. The wobbos of the old forum have all but dissapeared. Not many of them backed up their posts like i did so i don't blame them when the old forum was erased, WITHOUT ANY NOTICE. That probably killed off 80% of those types of posters and they quit the game all together.

how the hell does erasing an old forum with posts matter _AT ALL_ ? if you wrote a guide/something bigger the poster obviously should have backed that up, and the rest dont matter. you seem to be a guy who in politics are called 'professional at being offended'.

second of all, the people they were talking about didnt do anything in QL and they have nothing to do with QL in the first place. 'old' ql forums have absolutely nothing to do with people who made osp, ra3, cpm, cpma

only legit grudges from people who actually do something are mappers who have a hard time getting their maps into QL

Dude you have no idea the amount of 3rd party developers were busy working on things that either got ignored by id or got cease and desist letters from them. Whether it be sig makers like ansuz or leaderboards (brownie), etc. (don't have list in front of me at moment). Those people all could have helped jumpstart the game at a much faster pace. But ALL of them, and i talked to pretty much most of them, said they were never contacted by id until...

Oh and i was answering cityy NOT YOU. But to answer your smartallack response. Many posts were NOT backed up by anyone but me. I don't care if you believe that or not, it's true. Those posts are forever lost unless i decide to make them public again, which at this point would be a waste of my time since ql is going nowhere.

There were guides and lists for just about anything you can imagine that helped foster the growth in ql we saw in 2009. Ever since that forum went down, that growth has dissapeared. Don't discount what the deletion of that forum did. I'll say again, that old forum, as useless as you say it was, brought in 300 people at any time of the day. Now it's between 60-100 at best. Subscriptions didn't outright kill the community. It was the death of the old forum. A lot of people were pissed off their old posts were deleted and complained and never came back. I could make a nice little list of that as well,but is it really necessary at this point? You know it and i know it.

Name me one time, other than here with ql, that a major game decided to delete all community usermade content without warning those users of said deletion. I believe it's unprecedented for a major game (at the time). What you and others don't realize, is that the reason it was deleted was not because syncerror pushed a button. It was because someone (probably yakumo) didn't know how to upgrade vbulletin properly. It was an accident. Yes that's right, you heard it here first. I should know as i've been running vbulletin forums for over 15 years. But an accident that no competent forum admin (with proper knowledge of the software) would ever make.

When people say that id headquarters is full of noobs, what they really should be saying is, id headquarters hires a lot of noobs (free or not). That is the real truth. The contracters they hire have made a mess of things. That includes darkon who never properly coded the mac side of ql (still full of bugs). Have you even seen what the guy looks like? Would you trust your business in his hands? youtube his name sometime... you'll realize why this game has gone to shit...

CS 1.6 and CS:S are not the same bro. Completely different game just that they both share the same concept of planting and defusing the bomb. If there were the same then why would there be a need for CSPromod? :s

Just to explain a little. I'm not hating on carmac. I think it is partially because of him that we had 2 great seasons of quakelive in IEM; he loves quake, he thinks quake is great for esports, it's all obvious.

However, he used to be the journalist who kept talking about staying true to what you believe in. He kept hating on bad choices of businessmen, unfortunately imposed upon the esports community. He kept hating, even more so, on people who abused the community for their own good (hello Angel Munoz).

Now, he can't do any of that. In the interview I quoted he had said that he will double his value by joining, if I'm not mistaken, ESL. In some ways, he did. I'm certain that he does many great things, but unfortunately, as IEM is not perfect, he, as a representer of it, has to bend his "true" beliefs.

I don't think that one can be in that position and be utterly honest. However, it is sad that a thing such as esports, shaped by young, ambitious people, has to bend to the guys that know nothing about it even in it's infancy.

Yeah, that's what I mean... his opinion is highly valued there, but if he pick ql for another year, he will actually endanger his job(and opposite, he/they picked game that will bring MUCH more viewers, probably double-tripling them).

The quotation from readmore.de was about "what if I'm a journalist and find myself in an esports world which I completely dislike?"

I don't dislike the current esports world. I actually think it's one of the coolest esports periods in its history (thanks to SC2).

About the Twitter comment: I just wanted to illustrate a trend, that every game after QW received hate for being "newbie". QW players look down on Q3 players, Q3 players look down on CS players, CS players look down on Source players, etc. etc.

All of those scenes are actually 100% right from the point of view of the skill set that their particular game requires. At the same time, we know all of those games have good scenes in their own right, and the same guy / team wins in the end.

I understand people are disappointed and I do not blame them for it. Still, if you want to imply that I'm a sellout using those quotations, then you should have done so after I wrote my first word of Counter-Strike coverage :)

I understand where you come from and what you're elaborating on. It's easy to interpret all of that out of the vague post I made.

However, it is another thing that worries me. I don't expect a reply from you on this, but it's something that touches this subject, the reason I posted these quotes and I've wanted to it write down for a long time, so I guess it's a good chance, here and now.

There are two distinguishable types of haters on esports games:

The uninformed hater:

All he wants is his perfect game to flourish. He doesn't delve into other scenes, he hates on all of the other games and thinks all the other communities are constituted by idiots. He's the guy that hates on games because they're different and they don't fit the exact skillset of his game, even if they might have a entirely different, new skillset. There are people like that in all of the scenes, and they don't understand that their game might be just as bad compared to some more hardcore titles.

The informed hater:

He's been around to see at least a few downgrades of skill in sequels of several games. Usually, he enjoys or at least respects a few games of different genres. He might be unhappy with the downgrade from Third Strike to SF4, or from SCBW to SC2, but, given no choice, he understands that it's inevitable.

However, having a decent understanding of these different skill-sets of different games, he still highly dislikes and hates on some games that are, in his opinion, below a certain threshold, gameplay-wise. More importantly, he doesn't portray anything as black and white - he respects the champions of the game and respects the skills the game has to offer, he just thinks the skill-cap is not high enough.

For me, it's very sad to see that nobody high up in the esports world acknowledges that there are some informed haters. Everybody seems to be defending against the uninformed idiots and throwing the informed guys in the same pit. I believe there are more things tied to the skill of the game than meets the eye, and ignoring these guys is bad for the whole esports scene. Always felt like writing an article about it, but cba with my bad english and the fact that nobody apart from me really cares about this.

In the first quote, you called out halo and made it obvious that you didn't believe it to be fit for esports.

Now, it seems like everybody treats such statements by obfuscating the view with replies that are true, yet trivial to the discussion. Quoting you:

@geekboys just remember the hardcore Quake people were saying CS is casual when it began having major tournaments.

I just wanted to illustrate a trend, that every game after QW received hate for being "newbie". QW players look down on Q3 players, Q3 players look down on CS players, CS players look down on Source players, etc. etc.

All of those scenes are actually 100% right from the point of view of the skill set that their particular game requires. At the same time, we know all of those games have good scenes in their own right, and the same guy / team wins in the end.

"The best player still comes out on top; The skillset is different; etc". Sure, there are idiots that don't know that, but when talking to an informed person these statements become straw-man arguments. And yet, nobody cares...

Actually, I do believe Halo is fit for esports - if you have a game which has a community that has websites, events, coverage and stars, then it doesn't matter if it's Sensible Soccer, WoW, Solitaire, Quake Live or Halo.

Just like it doesn't matter that I friggin' hate baseball and think it's stupid - it's a viable sport because it has all of the above.

I most certainly feel that Halo is less fit for esports than QL, but not unfit for esports.

Do you consider Halo less fit solely because of its worse technical features (for spectators and so on), or because of gameplay too?

If you believe, say, LoL to be inferior in difficulty to QL, then you can't really stay true too, but that's fairly minor if the things you spoke of [a community that has websites, events, coverage and stars] are are the only things that matter in your opinion..

I guess I envy your love for esports, because I have principles that wouldn't allow myself to stay true if I was to get involved in something ;(

I could also disagree with the fact that ClanBase had a super strong iCTF competition for UT. I think CTF in instagib is the most retarded form of competition. Apparently dozens of teams disagreed with me. Opinion.

As new player myself (from beta of QL onwards), being a clanned player, winning some minor awards here and there in UT, I think I can speak about these "other gamers", that are somehow "reluctant" to play QuakeLive.

Number 1 reason:
Quake 3 veterans. Why would anyone with big or small ambitions in gaming (like becoming pro, or just simply playing in a clan) start to play a game which has truckloads of people with years of experience? You must be a moron! (like I am) A completely new game delivers equal chances to everyone to become good.

Number 2 reason:
Difficulty. I've heard in duel shoutcasts, the game starts becoming real fun, when you finally master timing multiple items. The meta game part. Multiply this effect with the Q3 veterans who can time items on a 10th of a second without effort. Any idea how long it takes before you master all those small elements? I see the majority of players quit QL within 1 week, when they realize just how much they still need to learn. Before you learn these elemental things, you just feel lost in QL.

Besides that there are no real reasons, although id Software could think about hiring a different marketing team. Too many people have never even heard of QuakeLive, while they all know CoD or WoW.

reason number 2 is bullshit... a bit i mean... i got no problem with timing mega, red and 2 yellows and i play only few months... mostly because red and yellow are both 25 secs, so u can pick them up in same order for 10 minutes... so basiclly u time mega and red

It's not having an 'ability' to time items - it easy as long as you can add up small numbers :) The real problem has and will always lie in the type of game Quakelive currently is - brutally punishing to new players. I mean I can see their pov totally, why would any of them stick around to be constantly owned. I'm personally surprised Quakelive has lasted so long. I'd love to see some official stats for the number of regular active players - I imagine it's decreased a lot since it was released.

ID software didn;t help themselves either by not listening to the community and releasing bugger all decent content - which is the one thing an acient game like quake 3 needs, freshness! Why such a huge and mature company like id software can't this one fact is beyond me.

That's a common misconception, actually. Unlike events like Blizzcon, Quakecon is not run by id. I'm not saying that id would do any better on their own, but the failures of Quakecon are mostly the organizers.

In the case of the tournaments, I believe id has most of the say in what will be used, but they still have to answer to the sponsors. The actual event and tournament prizes are not funded by id, so they need tournament sponsorship that doesn't conflict with the event itself, and they need to convince the sponsor to support something that will be worth it to them.

I love those threads in which people rant about cs and lol even though they wouldn't be able to adapt and get up to a decent level with twice as much practice as the current top players have put into those games.

cs source......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... and fucking league of dogshit........... whaaat///

The TL community is pretty shit, actually. The extent of it is kpop, fanboys, "help w/ homework", and "HOW DO I GET A GIRLFRIEND". The only real value of the site is the wiki, and the schedule/stream listing.

I've been a bit sarcastic. I received about 5 bans on TL in ~1 month (now for 30 days and it's my "last chance") for writing normal things (being honest, not in abusive way), so I know it's ken&barbie land. It's still interesting site due to content nonetheless.

Just compare the QL page with other pages of games in IEM. Those pages are way more active than QL. Why can't we just show how active QL can be? Or do Quakers only play cups/leagues/ladders when there are prizes to grab?

ESL has everything to find easy matches, to plan matches in advance, ...

It's not because we didn't make IEM upcoming seasons, it can't be in the season after...

Actually ESL site is the worst site there is, it's confusing as fuck. I can never find things which I'm looking for, I've been trying to get used to it yet still I get lost all the time when I'm trying to search for something (results/cups).

quake3 would be totaly dead already 8 years ago as a game.
Reason why it's still here? One of the first pro gamers was from Qw / q2 / q3, so we had good support all over a years, with little player and spectator base we had quake3 in eswc and so on. its all becose we had good "backup", who could tell few good words about quake. We already enjoyed to many years of quake.
Quake will never rise again.
Next BIG fps game will be CS2, realistic and hardcore team game. With good support.

i know. i just felt like saying it anyway lol. i dont actually disagree with them at all. i mean lets face it, we all saw this coming. its not a surprise. and to be honest i dont even care that much. i was getting bored of watching the same players play the same maps anyway. i just find this whole thing interesting tho in terms of what a game needs to become an esport. and its also interesting how people change when they become part of a business.

if nobody of you enters tournaments like zotac/w/e do you think they will continue to show quake love?

especially a tournament like jeesports (that tiers prizemoney by number of attendends) shows how unsupportive most of you are

ql is competitive in its nature but there's just some pub heroes gg (same with the ql site that could support that shit even more so but doesn't - no streams no word of any tournament, no hype) or the cheapskates that don't want to afford a beer per month for this game and just whine whine whine (this attitude is 10x stronger on the official forums)

If existing players will enter tournaments more, it won't help a bit to get more players or viewers into QL. Actually, it will only reduce viewer number slightly, because some viewers will play tournament instead.

Atleast I dont care to enter tournaments when I am not in shape.. In order to get shape i need to play like a week actively... Playing quake competively out of shape will make me just rage... Also why would i train just to get to dropped out in semis or so? And like noctis said, praccing quake aint really that fun..

Anyway, for me this sentence concludes it quite well "Playing quake competively out of shape will make me just rage... ". Quake Live is just so fuckd up that u will not have fun if you cant play flawless basegame, even small mistake in basegame will make you lose though you would play otherwise good... Give game more forgiveness and more people will play it.

You don't need a flawless basegame at all lol, the only reason it looks like that in finals is because (well actually I believe the DH final was faster than beforehand but Rapha in particular plays the game very slow, making the mistakes even more important, but if you can outaim or outdamage your opponent you hardly need a "flawless basegame".

are u really saying that there arent lower skilled players than rapha that play that gamestyle? If you play @ pubs say 80% of semi-high skill players play very passive game and it makes it usually so that one mistake will be end of your game...

but in sc2 you arent forced to play hit-n-run if you do one mistake, you are rather forced to play very aggressive and harassive game, which is atleast for me a LOT more fun than finding good hiding spots and camping time out...

As for FPS, I don't understand the decision to put a worse version of 1.6 in the pool. One would have to believe that ID's lack of support for promoting QL would have to be the main cause of it's demise

I do kind of worry for the future of FPS as many of these games are going in a direction where the difference between the bottom and the top, skill wise, is so small that the competitive value is completely diminished. However, I do think either tactical intervention( no clue how it's doing in beta) or CS2 will be great games.

he's been trying to do that for two years or so, MLG Sundance keeps repeating that he can't find sponsors. It doesn't seem likely that it'd happen now, after ESWC and IEM drop it, as players are sure to stop practicing as much..

id dun goofed.
they should have remade quakeworld instead of the already stale q3. i knew that ql wasn't going to last that long in the pro scene as soon as it was announced.
quakeworld, since its the perfect fps game, would have been much better because it is unable to become stale.

msg to id/developers
start to consult with pro-gamers from now on! the fighting game community has been doing it recently and their games have been flourishing.

Not a surprise, always said that QL didn't have the viewers to sustain the competitions.

It was always known that ESWC and IEM were very close to dropping QL.

All I want in ql is inbuilt voice chat, being able to kick people in a game (read: cheaters) and having a change to the way premium/standard features are done (read: hardly any premium gets played except duels).

It's pretty sad really and I'm not sure why anyone here is surprised in the least.

Those viewing figures for DH are cringe worthy too - especially bad considering it was basically all the top Quakelive players playing at once, in a single competitive event. If that can't attract some decent viewing figures I'm sure Quakelive has no hope :)

Yup. I realized a long time ago Quake was dying, but seeing the stream numbers during DH made me realize how close we really are. No surprise here, really. Quite the contrary, I would've been surprised if they had kept QL.

Again: 12k at the end of the tdm final were quite obviously sc2 (or was it cs? i don't remember) players waiting for the game to end and their finals to start.
Throughout the tournament there were 2-3k people watching (4k if you could the russian streams). So it's quite obvious the number is not representative.

A lot of cheese consists of very legitimate strategies which require very strong micro in order to execute against high level players. As the game has progressed players are becoming far more aware of queues that tip off cheese, and many players will proactively scout and prepare for it. I'd say the most crucial element of the game is scouting and gathering as much information about what your opponent is doing, which is relatively indifferent from Chess.

The only way to save quake is a Quake 5 that is mostly multiplayer focused, and maybe add on there a fun to play SP ala Q1. (I've seen Carmack saying the next quake would be a "Quake Arena based game, and that it would be the end-all-be-all of Quake games, then recently I said him it would be a "Q1 style game")

-Last-gen graphics, gore-ish as fuck, adrenaline pumping (tell me a newbie that doesn't put a smile on their face playing a 16 player FFA at Q3 with all the flying blood and gibs, explosions, and fucked up stuff all over the screen) but with appealing aesthetics (no more fucking Stroggos hi-tech thing, but more competitive-ish looking stuff, like you are in a sort of gladiator arena, like it's some sort of sick sport entertainment for an alien race, like Q3 was, Q3 had perfect aesthetics),
-Q3 physics (newbies don't give a fuck about physics, and Q3 are ok enough, yet not as complex as CPM/QW),
-All competitive stuff that CPMA/OSP delivers since DAY ONE (not needing 40 patches to play a decent game, aka Q4.
-Super nice mouse response, reduced input lag, etc (Carmack is aiming for this with the new IdTech being used in Rage)
-Matchmaking system that actually works.
-And last but most important: Massive ad campaing. A TV add that says it's trendy to play Q5, and that you can win prizes and travel the world playing it. Kids (and people in general) are dumb as fuck and believe anything the tv says. They would think it's cool and the playerbase would grow.

Quake died in 2005, you wasn't there, you didn't see how it happened. This is a blast from the past, similar situation with one difference: ql was a flop from the beginning. Get used to it and go play with the rest of the community because in a few month there will be no opponents for you. And also fuck you, raged dumbfuck.

And so is q2 and so is qw and so is q3 and so is q4 :)
If you look at it like a game that had a good enough run, had a competitive scene, had up to 20 players that could make it hardcore enough for us to stand amazed and have a 1-2 year run in tournament circuit.

I find Quakelive to be a success, it gave poeple dissapointed in q4 a chance to play a game that both incorporated tradition, and some of Quake's most active and watched time with something new.

If QL is only a short term test phase to a sequel that would use what's gathered in this time wisely, than it's fine by me. let it die slowl and prepare for something new and better.

With what is been said about what's needed to make a quake game more on edge I don't see development quite near as finished as it should be for them to port the code into a sequel. thus quake is on low but dead yet.

Finally, someone who is thinking in a bigger picture. Doesn't anyone else think that maybe the reason why no new players are coming to Quake is because all QuakeLive is an awful, buggy, shitty version of a 10 year old game to begin with?

What is there to be excited about as a new player? QuakeLive was pathetically put together to put id software back onto the minds of their loyal fanbase; most likely to promote Rage, which, in my mind, nobody really seems to give a shit about.

id needs to develop Quake 5. Will a NEW game garner interest? Of course. QuakeLive didn't bring back ALL ex-Quakers. There are still thousands out there that have no interest in playing Quake3 Fisher Price edition, however, I can guarantee the interest would be rekindled if Quake 5 were announced. Rage seems to be nothing more than a project for Carmack to give himself multiple nerd boners on his way to a gigantic rocketship geekgasm. Fuck Rage, fuck Doom 4, make Quake you assholes.

Just found it kind of interesting. Didn't think there were too many sc2 players who really had much regard for quake just based off of the extremely low number of stream views for recent events. But it sounds like quake will be genuinely missed over there as well.

fuck id and fuck esl too...league of horsedick really? thought its an e-sports leage. guess its just lets shit on principles make some $$$$ yo
next game should be competitive sims 2 replacing counterstrike imo.

Quakelive have failed because it wasnt able to renew the winning formula of the quake serie. Id must learn from sc2.

Lets see casual gamers point of view first. Casual gamers dont play in leagues but plays an important roles inside the game by increasing the number of tournament viewers and fans.
What a casual gamer needs to be addicted to a game?

1) stupid objectives
2) stupid small rewards for their playing (like the possibility to choose a different color of the nick)
3) ladders
4) the possibility of play with people of their skill
5) A game ready to play out of the box
6) maybe a strong and fun single player story
7) maybe a coop mode to have relax with friends
8) statistics statistics and even more statistics

Now if anyone have played sc2 knows why that game wins in all these aspects and quakelive fails (even if little attempts have been made in the right directions).

Another reason of fail is that most of the new kids and gamers (which is the necessary players base that substitute the old players base that is slowly becoming old and have to face with marriages, works and general lack of time to play) start to play with the dream of becoming a strong player, winning prizes and maybe, one day, beeing payed for playing the game they like.
Quake is not the choice they will made because of all the reason we know (difficulty and so on).

Speaking about numbers i dont think that the player base of 1997/2003 (when quake was at top) was so larger than 2009/2011. I think that the numbers was more or less the same (i think that quake can have more or less a 20k/25k player base that plays constantly) but at the time the games choice was between 2 - 3 titles so the internet community wasnt splitted. The problem is that with the spread of internet, quake was not the choice for the new player mass and others community have grown while ours community remained more or less the same with some additions and some retirments.

Finally a good news: if every player in this forum will play just for fun and not for having a payback, then quakelive will not die for us.
A 4k, 5k player base is enough for playing tournaments and cups for lot of years :)

you dont necessarily have to do changes to the actual game to make the whole experience more casual friendly. creating arbitary levels for playing, statistics etc take nothing away from gameplay. nor does adding a coop mode vs bots or some other shit

Probably there should be some legislative regulations concearning gaming tournaments. Some original competitive games - must have! To maintain some gaming culture. So ... wanna have a LoL tournament - 30% of prize stack for QL discipline))) Otherwise only LoL and farmville on events)

srsly) ppl throw some ancient shit on Olympics and nobody cares that money and audience is far from football (soccer) - because its tradition, history and culture

The thing is Quake Live has a lot of casuals too that haven't even heard of players like Cooller or Rapha etc.

If stream numbers mean so much to tournament organisers, why doesn't ID just include a live stream player on the Quake Live homepage and match browser? Is it really that hard for them to do? I mean they are organising the LAN server for the tournament at the same time aren't they? It's not like they don't know a LAN is happening.

The numbers would please tournament organisers/sponsors and then there's always the chance of ID converting a few of the casual players of their game into more hardcore players. Just spam a quick message into each server when a stream is going live?

Apart from this idea I also think that different games should target different sponsors. A company like Intel perhaps wouldn't have much interest in sponsoring a Quake Live tournament. But sponsors like Razer (peripherals) or Samsung (120hz monitors) on the other hand would see more benefit from the highly competitive/less casual Quake Live scene.

indeed it is mind boggling. the very first thing i had in mind when i heard about ql being web based "yeah links and ads for tournaments directly on the quake site, awesome". i cannot fathom how it hasnt happened yet

Well, even if I respect the work lvlup do, I think their last coverage at Dreamhack was not done enough professionally to be in the Quake Live homepage to be honest... However id could have made some advertising for the finals on stage on the official DH stream, yeah.

In my opinion this concept that everything related to a tournament coverage must be uber professional is just hurting esports more than it's helping it. When you put on guys wearing a suit and a t-shirt trying to be all pro, you miss out on all the good atmosphere these events are in the 1st place. Keep it light and fun, this is what 90% of the viewers want in eSports. If they want srs business they will go watch the Superbowl or something.

Professionalism in eSports requires a smooth and timely transition to reach that level we see on TV during sporting events and such. All in good time.

I agree mostly, but one thing that really must hurt eSports a lot is the frequent delays that the audience is often not properly informed about and lack of information about how long said delays are. I can't imagine large-scale spectator interest if you may often have to wait something like 5 hours extra in front of the computer for something to start and can't even go and do something else because there is no set time that you've been told about.

This happened most recently with DreamHack and I'm sure it was mostly fault of the event organizers instead of lvl^, but really somebody needs to make them start taking the casters seriously enough to at least inform them better about what's happening. Setting a new scheduled time and being done in time for it would be even better and not having these insane delays to start with would be ideal.

I don't think we were particularly unprofessional, but if id wanted a certain "professional style" or to showcase their game what better way then directly contacting streamers and giving them the resources to put across their message.

not sure if the guy who brought it up meant professional as in suits and shit.

i do however think that since delays are inevitable at most tournaments, there should be some thought put into keeping viewers interested during the delays. a first thought that occurred to me is to stream a demo of a previous game (possibly games that werent covered) or a quake movie, than pointless elongated interviews.

Yep, totally agree there. I did watch a lot of the lvl coverage and 90% of the it was made up as they went a long - you really could tell :) Maybe having something prepared to fill these voids would help keep people interested. On the whole, the actual commentry when a match was taking place was good, but for the rest of the time, it was painful in all honesty.

I disagree. Because when you have a 10-15 hour long cast, you can't simply fill in the voids with frag movies, demo replays or whatever. You would get bored of that by the 3rd or 4th time it ran.

Isn't it better to have on the spot interviews and some random fun banter between the casters and the players? Isn't this what most people want to see in between games? Or we could have just slapped a "BRB" image with some music on instead and cared less.

Most of you think that running coverage for a live event is as easy as drawing a 3 step plan on a piece of paper the night before and sticking to it, but in fact it's much, much harder than that. Especially when delays come in (and they always come in).

This event I didn't have time to get involved that much with the Quake coverage as I had other duties @ Dreamhack, but from what I did manage to see/hear, it wasn't that much different from what was done at Dreamhack Winter the year before, so I don't really see what was so "painful" about it this time.

I know it's hard to please everybody, but sometimes it just feels that the more you give out to people, the faster they get annoyed when a pixel is not in the right spot.

I didn't exactly mean suits either, but if id had some particular requirements for the stream in order for us and others to have it embedded on the main Quake Live site then we would be more then happy to accommodate them.

I think its a difficult job running a broadcast that is on constantly for 17 ours straight, and trying to fill it up at all times with content that will please everybody is close to impossible. Some enjoy awkward interviews and others like to watch frag movies they have seen a thousand times.

Can always improve and if time allows and it is possible to get the demos then it would be great to stream missed games.

one of the things that came up in one discussion i had about this whole id promoting streams of events on ql main page, was that it wasnt so much that streams werent "professional" as the fact that id had no control over what would be shown on the streams at all which could possibly lead to rating violations since ql is esrb rated to some age and what not. so there MIGHT be some legal issues.

altho personally my take on it is that there should be pretty easy ways of overcoming this. at worst they could slap on an age verifier every time u click a stream link from the ql page. but then again im not a lawyer and im not a paranoid idiot either.

Similar reply to as the other guy above. Count the number of "in between" game moments, add the time up, count for delays while you're at that as well and you will end up with a pretty lengthy time frame.

Demos and movies would only work for 1/4 of that time frame, whereas interviews and fun banter on the camera could easily fill up at least 3/4 of that if done right. Dreamhack Winter coverage is a prime example, but many would argue that 2GD made up for 50% of it. True to an extent but I don't think it was that bad this time around either. It still looked like fun. I agree that maybe next time we can diversify more and combine these 2 techniques and perfect the viewer experience during dead air time.

dont understand people hating on carmac, specially slasher. carmac is a guy who pushed the dead horse that ql is for 2 fuckin years, and in those 2 years id did absolutely NOTHING on their part to justify the mere existence of quake live, let alone for it to be included in major lans or anything else.

TBH we're to blame for pushing pro-gaming over the game, most people here wanted duel over tdm yet i bet most dont play/suck at duel, team games are more popular but seems QL killed them pushing too much duel comps

Also shouldn't of been hard to see hardcore games and esports don't mix, ie event runners need to make money, money comes from advertisers who want a high number of spectators.

Someone fix up a stand alone CQ3 already so we can dump QL for good, and rebuild team games in quake

learn to read, what i basically said is: Q3 HAS NO COMMUNITY THAT PLAYS IT ANYMORE AND WON'T HAVE EVER AGAIN... no one is going back, and people that never moved to ql are cpm guys which numbers at least in europe are barely above 100 (#cpmpickup).

From what I've seen this game is neither a dead end nor spectator unfriendly like so many people here are saying. I'm rather new at this game, though I used to play some quake when I was young. I've promoted this game to many friends and I've seen alot of people I know from other games try it out. About half of those give up because the learning curve can be rather steep, but alot of them really like the complexity of the game and keep playing it, albeit occasionaly. My friends list is pretty much 80% new players. And even more so, even the people who don't really enjoy playing QL, really like speccing those duel games!

Sure, the top players are always the same ones, but all those new players have 10 years to catch up, what do you expect. So yeah, perhaps LoL has a bigger base of (casual) gamers, but stop saying QL is on it's retour. From where I'm standing, it's exactly the opposite.

1. Let the community handle the development od Quakelive. After all the time, QL is still nowhere near to cmpa and slowly fading away. The support of newcomers is zero, none of the potencial has been fulfilled (ie. having daily tournaments with no prizes with signing up just by clicking, hyping the game via built-in GTV streaming nonstop, either casual games with highly rated players, or the tournaments etc etc etc). Simply, a lot of work needs to be done and ID is never gonna do it, it was always the players who took care of any of the quake games.

2. Get back to cmpa. Would result into shrinking the community, on the other hand we would have a working game that does not require ID's permission about LAN servers. And again, a lot can be done even here to attract new players.

eDawn looks good, but needs massive stuff to be added.
And it's going to be a pain the ass for the newbies to download Q3, install 1.32, install eDawn, and find an eDawn server with actual people on there.

Q3 mod. Runs smoother than 16yo pussy. Has all rulesets (including QL). Has nice stuff from QL, like flags, scoreboards with lots of stats and shit. Basically the goal is to morph all rulesets into the same game.

Plus you can play all maps for free (wow, can't believe people is paying to play some hub) which is something people seems to have forgotten.

I'll add that ( if I'm not mistaken ) it has antilag on/off ( usually decided by the ruleset ) and that the server refresh is way faster than osp ( which means that if you somehow want to play it the oldschool way hitscans won't feel like shit as fast as ping 30 )

The worst thing that could happen to QL is community development. Community doesn't have vision at all. Support of newcomers? LOL, community developed QL will only drive them away and also break the existing player base. Even your primary point is "QL is not CPMA", but in reality this is the lowest priority issue for QL.

Quake scene was alive only because of the community. With no OSP or CPMA, quake 3 would have been dead for ages and today there would be no quakelive. Vq3 was the reason why Q3 made it back to ESWC, whether you like it or not.
With no help from the players, QL is never gonna reach the point of not being a slightly improved 1999 baseq.

It was "alive" only because of the initial Quake/Doom popularity => huge initial amount of players. Community developed Q3 slowly went from the most popular FPS to a small niche game. All it was doing is losing players and interest of people during 2000-2009.

Point A is where any retarded mod dev who listens too much to the community stands and ruins his own mod.

Point C is where Arqon used to stand with his elitist bullshit.

Point B is where any sensible person would stand.
If other people actually have to be in charge of collecting feedback and telling people to fuck off so the devs dont get the random hate I'm pretty sure we'd find them pretty fast. Yes, I think we're that desperate that meatshields are a valid option.

You really can't blame LoL now can you? What a simple ploy of getting the user to land on the live stream page as soon as they logged into their LoL accounts. Where do you think the 170k viewers came from?

ID obviously lacked such creative thinking, for if the fate of QL was going to be decided on the number of viewers alone, you can guarantee more than 5000 logins on any fucking weekend.

Edit: Just read Syncerror's posts:
@SyncError|home • LoL paid their way in.
@SyncError|home • We offered to do the same, but they said they couldn’t run 4 games.

I say good riddance coz QL should die instantly, not because of its community but because of the ones who take its community for granted.

There are 3 parties in all this, you have ESL, the QL community and ID.

ESL: the decision made by ESL is business wise seen the correct decision. It's all about views to get good sponsorship. If QL only had 12000 viewers and LoL Invitational had 100000 (for not even being a real IEM game), then there is no doubt they should take it in.

QL community: with all respect, but the Quake community is like the worst community I have ever seen. I have played AAO, COD series, CS and now Quake, and I have never seen such a lazy and selfish community. (I probably do not make myself popular by saying this, but I personally think it should be said.).

I am new in the Quake scene since Quake Live and I actually do enjoy the game. However, from the moment I tried to get in competition, CTF, TDM I just backed off. As I wanted to learn how to play competitive, I joined some pick ups, to bad people start raging because they had to play with a noob. If you don't give people time to work themselves in, then you won't see the competitive scene grow. Learning how to play CTF, TDM isn't done in public. So... for me QL became a regular public game which I enjoy to play.

Stating Quake Live doesn't get any new players is totally wrong. Basically Quake did get A LOT of new players. However, all those new players see QL as a good public game. I rather would descripe it as: Quake Live isn't getting any new competitive players.

ID: As I have never played an other Quake, I can't say much about previous versions. But I can say that everything in Quake Live is new to me. As everyone is bored of playing Campgrounds, well... I am not! Because the game is new for me. Maybe that's what ID is going for? Maybe they just want to attract new players, increase their activity on the website and don't care at all about competitive play? Maybe competition is just free propaganda for them? (I have no idea what ID invests in competition, just insinuating)

Taking a look at RIOT then with LoL. Well... they aimed on competition and in no time they reached the top. Maybe ID should do the same?

you blame COMMUNITY blame yourself and ID
ID just created community as it is (oh sorry the better part of it was created by itself so dont credit those morons for that)
ID didnt give any tools didnt promote team based games
and didnt listen to ppl who wanted good just bunch of noobs like you

AND AS A NOOB aint you mad that not even till this day updates have no cfg attachment with all commands & commentary what they do and highlighted new commands and commands that are deleted
and many more things which could help you to be more "pro" and this game to be smth more then just bunch of random FFA crowd
its not like ppl can do anything about it its all ID so dont bash the community rather appreciate it and learn some character observe and listen (even trollin )
BTW you seen crash bs trainin vid ask ID why they didnt do one about competitive CTF TDM how to easy get on IRC since they dont offer any shit by themselfs and about PICKUPS
ID never showed straight what direction game is heading and they didnt actually listen
ps NOOB is not an insult
ps2 wtf reaction did you expect on pickup from ppl who passed the level of public FFA rampage with retarded team arena and want to be freed from that crap
what reaction did you excpect from ppl about who devs just dont give a f....
they are not paid to help you they even pay but for what ??? and they pay not only with money but with time too
ps3 dont get insulted i dont expect any reply just go there behave and demand smth from ID for the time or money you spend with this sorry ass product
im sure that when ID will do smth nice community will become more noob friendly so far i cant say anything good about forever beta quality and treatment (im not sayin that theres perfect game reasonable ppl will know wtf) but i wonder if it isnt too late now

He's saying id hasn't outlined the direction ql is heading since marty's original posts on the old beta forum. He's not wrong. How is that rage? Why do guys like you continue to use the "whine" excuse everytime anyone makes a complaint. So there are no legitimate complaints? because what he said about ql's inability to showcase the direction for this game is not wrong. I hope you're not insisting he is.

He said:

ID didnt give any tools didnt promote team based games

how is he wrong?

He said:

AND AS A NOOB aint you mad that not even till this day updates have no cfg attachment with all commands & commentary what they do and highlighted new commands and commands that are deleted

who made the ultimate cvar list? was it id or themuffinman86? and no he doesn't work for id. Anytime a Cvar is added there is very little information explaining what it does. There are exceptions, but for the most part noobs are expected to know how to use them.

He said:

BTW you seen crash bs trainin vid ask ID why they didnt do one about competitive CTF TDM how to easy get on IRC since they dont offer any shit by themselfs and about PICKUPS

How is he wrong? All the videos you see on youtube are created by non id employees. If those people had the power to post those videos directly on quakelive.com then it wouldnt' be an issue but that's not possible is it....

He said:

ID never showed straight what direction game is heading and they didnt actually listen

How is he wrong here? Where are the devblogs? They even promised them last march!! and they HAVE NOT COME SINCE. What the first post on the new forum ? lol

He said:

im sure that when ID will do smth nice community will become more noob friendly so far i cant say anything good about forever beta quality and treatment (im not sayin that theres perfect game reasonable ppl will know wtf) but i wonder if it isnt too late now

he's not wrong there. It will take something id does to get the community back on their side of things. Dont' discount the things he says in there because of a little bit of unintelligible text (there was a little haha), the points he made are valid and true.

Have you not noticed that the developers are now starting to blame the community for their own downfall? That reeks of elitism. They can't even admit their own mistakes. That's sad really.

Dunno man, I had best time in the q3 community. When i wanted to start playing FPS online, i first tried q2.
Back then 33.600 k modem, nowhere near trained to hear or see what a experienced player would see in my place i got bashed, banned, kicked, etc and all by totally cool and easy going q2 community which nurtures to this day some of the most hardcore, zealot types you can find in online gaming.

It's pretty much shits and giggles when you can play in your own small community, nation wise and that's it. But started providing much more. You are pretty much more open on playing servers you wouldn't normally play, expands people you are usually playing.

I'm not saying there aren't cheaters or plane plonkers around which ruin public games, and which disconnect or rage quit or should get banned. But in 2 years of playing quake live I've sorted around a 100 players which are stand up guys and which are fun to play on servers and you know they'll fuck up in less then 10 percent of the time.

Not to mention little efforts like pickups, mini sites like holyshit, playquake etc.

you said somewhere
"you need to build from the bottom, not from the top"

but here you tend to ignore the expierience from the "old" bottom
but moreless i agree with your thought
and its sort of what i had in mind and what many ppl were tellin id since very begining and were gettin banned
dont look so mean on q3 players they really were concerned about newcomers and wanted to welcome them with hands wide open

1. Taking care of the newcomers should be the priority of QL, since its not an easy game to understand. There is no config guide, no map guide, no gun guide, no demos, no community info, no fucking nothing easily accessable from the main menu. Todays avarage gamer is a dumb and lazy retard, who wont make the effort to look through the forums that are full of shit anyway. Probly then just gonna leave and play CoD or LoL.

2. The gameplay. Netcode is still ass, as is the mouse response. We were promised many things by SyncFaggot, but Quakelive is still what Quake 3 used to be in the beginning, that means in 1999. It is fun, yes, but when you compare QL to CPMA (2006), its frustrating.

3. The hype. Again, promises turned into a bullshit. GTV, the heart of quake and its hype, just isnt there. Theres no direct link on the streams and people, who dont visit ESR or the tournament sites, just dont watch, because they have no clue that something is happening. Thats why we get 5000 people on the stream, while we could get 20k or more. But sure, why would the lame ID team even bother to provide links to zotac or something, its not their thing. Yea.

4. Communication with the community. Non existent.

5. Tournaments. So much potencial - just make the browser tournament menu on the main page so people can see the list of upcoming tournaments and sign in just by clicking. But again, nothing. Would take some effort, unlike the fucking DevPics.

6. Keeping the casual players busy - this might seem like a minor thing, but its not. Actually I know a lot of people who love playing Starcraft 2 just because of the achievements and avatars. In QL, you dont have this motivating stuff. There are achievements, yes, but what for. If you could unlock more skins or like 1-week pro account for certain amount of hours you play, those things would make the difference when a bored, hesistating guy is choosing between sc2 or ql, for example.

I could go on like this forever. The Quake community - as harsh, ignorant, hating, selfish and whatever - may seem (and probably is), has risen Quake 3 from the dead and got it back to ESWC. Without this, there would be no Quakelive today.
Dont blame us for hating the newbies spoiling the challenge, blame ID for not having a good system, where newbies get to play newbies.

Theres no direct link on the streams and people, who dont visit ESR or the tournament sites, just dont watch, because they have no clue that something is happening.

I would also have a hard time following starcraft 2 if i wouldn't read teamliquid.

I could go on like this forever. The Quake community - as harsh, ignorant, hating, ignorant, selfish and whatever - may seem (and probably is), has risen Quake 3 from the dead and got it back to ESWC. Without this, there would be no Quakelive today.

huh? There hasn't been a single eswc without quake till now and it wasn't exactly a community achievement that they switched back to q3 after q4 died

And you don't see how a harsh, ignorant, hating, selfish community can put off newbies?

There hasn't been a single eswc without quake till now and it wasn't exactly a community achievement that they switched back to q3 after q4 died

Oh, it was. If there was no OSP or CPMA, Q3A would have perished and there would be 5 people left playing Q4 by now, version 179.78678678c, if it was on ID. (in case they would care about releasing that many patches, which they probably wouldnt).

And you don't see how a harsh, ignorant, hating, selfish community can put off newbies?

SC2 community is full of nerdy kids, nonstop whining about the balance, progamers ragequitting, then you have this sleaziest and most retarded commentator ever, day9, who stated earlier himself that hes doing it all only for money. Does that make playing Sc2 less enjoyable? Nope.

How nice of you to give the credit for creating osp/cpma to the whole community instead of the few people that actually did the work. You are probably one of the guys that whined at the mod devs as well, the typical angry quake player that every newbie is best adviced to stay far away from.

THAT'S A GUIDE? That hasn't been updated in years. It is lacking so many essential things necessary for a noob to master the game its' not even funny. Where are all the rocket jump/strafe jump videos?

Aim only comes after movement. They already got rid of the training courses last year.... has anyone made any sense of that move btw?

problem is, id wont' add anything to the game if they didn't make or produce it themselves. Not only are they paranoid about copyright but they downright hate giving praise to anyone other than themselves. God forbid someone else makes a better guide or sitemap than them. hahha. Elitists man, that's all they are. It's quite obvious. They don't even mention the mappers names when they release the maps in most updates.

7. no custom mapping costests
8. no discounts for frequent players
9. false advertised skillmatching system
10. removal of leaderboards, training maps, crash match, profile stats, being able to play the premium maps in training mode, warsaw-russian-singapore-japanese servers, etc etc etc... all theyv'e been doing is removing things and in place we get a few shitty maps that are hardly ever played
11. so many to list i can't even bother anymore. not doing any most lists for id, let them figure the shit out themselves for once.

Knowing syncerror, he's probably busy mapping right now instead of fixing the important bugs in the game itself. You know it's true. That's what he spends 2/3rd of his day doing. He's supposed to be managing the damm game. I'm telling you man, he's gotta go. It's crystal clear to me. If he wants to be a mapper, then fine, but for him to be lead for this project is a joke. He is in charge and he has failed. Donald trump would have fired his ass after the first challenge as team leader. Simple business 101.

when the bugz rear their ugly heads and eat your sensitivity settings. Or you realize you really should've heard something you didn't or when frames start dropping, or when maps still don't loook like they should.

Many sound drops have been addressed. I don't even know if new bugs in that matter are reported since LG drops. Frame dropping 99% caused by user that does not know how to update drivers properly. Sensitivity never changed for me. And it's also users fault if perfectly normal maps don't display properly while using screwed up config.

In other words, there's only so much idiot proofing they can do. And it's usually the idiots who scream loudest about the "bugs"

Carmac kinda spells it out really well. There is a dwindling amount of new players and realistically for a FREE game there shouldn't be, there needs to be some sort of walkthrough on every, or at least all of the largest QL community websites on how to get started and move forward as a new competing Quake Live player.

"Prize money will not change it. It did not help PainKiller, did it? Quake Live desperately needs to increase its player base and find ways to nurture the newbie until he becomes a decent player. If the player base increases, so will the spectator base and so will the prize money. Everything comes from the bottom up, not the other way around"

the ql forums? . Check it somettime. There's about 60-90 people on at any given point in time. You know what it was last year on the old forum? in the 300's. 2/3 of the forum ql userbase left. This site is way more active than that poor excuse of an official forum. 2 reasons for that:

1. nazi mods
2. deletion of old forum

the general discussion page would span 2-3 pages for a day, now it's lucky to span 1

the old clan forum page would span about 3 days worth, now it spans a week

does the company that released it somewhat care about it
is it a fucking hassle to get servers running ( and even if it's now pretty guaranteed that the lan servers will be up remember dh winter 2010 when the master server went down )
would sponsors be interested ( I'm pretty sure there's a ratio between game popularity and internet bashing - even though it would only matter to the companies that release products gamers could possibly use - )

My e-dream would be for e-sports to have 4 major titles.
Team-RTS --> LoL/DotA/HoN (i guess LoL would be the best choice here, because of the numbers and Riot sponsoring the tournaments)
Team-FPS --> Counter-Strike (pretty obvious choice i guess)
1on1-RTS --> SC2 (as before)
1on1-FPS --> Quake (as before)

What about the innability to host servers.. from my country we don't have a single server which means there's no way for community reunion .. well .. it killed the community basicly.

In q3 we had server and we organized national cups all the time.. we had big trolls between clans which was in a funny way a motivational factor and there was alot of competition and newcomers.

It's just a fact.. many players dont care to play at .de server where the pros are and go to zotac cups and lan competition.. they want to share gaming experiences with people from the same city/country.

website signups having huh?
why would any quake player sign up atm when there are no quake competitions at eswc? i mean you dont need to sign up for anything so why would anyone do it and why would they measure a games popularity by it then?

Each year we make a statement that everybody can vote their game into the new ESWC season. We use these numbers as indication. It not only displays how big a community is, but also our reach to certain community's.

How to vote? Create an account and fill in the form. You'll see the news post at the beginning of the year.

Speaking as a noob to quake. I started playing quake live almost 2 years ago. Becoming even mildly decent at the game took 2 months of getting shit on 0-35 by better players. I only kept playing because I love challenging myself and I felt like I've never seen such depth in an FPS before this one.

Everyone single friend I've tried to get to play quake live has quit within the first week because they just get destroyed non-stop.

The last time I ask them to play everyone of them has come up with the same basic answer, "I can't do anything I just die over and over."

I have hope for this game though, because the same people who say they can't play it still love to watch duelers at the highest level go at it. This is the reason why its such a great spectator e-sport. Even people who don't play or know nothing about the game still enjoy watching it.

And there will always be people like me who will play it just for the challenge.

If I lose and cant imagine myself winning if I changed something i did in the last game (folded instead of called in poker, made other units etc in rts, peeked that corner in other fps:es etc) I will never have the motivation to play again.

Hell if I have never felt the joy of winning a quake duel at all and lost 0-30 in each duel, why should I keep on playing?

To the point:

Change quake duel so its ALOT closer even if the skill level differ. This can be done without dumbing the game down. At all.

The only thing I can think of would be to enforce a handicap. ( which doesn't even really work, I've destroyed quite a few friends with 50% lg @ handicap 50, even people who had a quake/ut background )

*Domination should be broken when one player scores, the playingfield should be leveled again.

If you mean a handicap that increases/decreases on the fly it would be messy as hell for both players.

*The amount of armor on the other player has should be visible on the player at a rough level.

Right, decent idea. Just get a ra/ya/ga symbol somewhere on the hud when you're shooting at someone, said symbol fades away 3 seconds after your last shot and should not care about any armor picked up after said last shot.

*The timing of items should be roughly visible at their pickup spot.

Decent idea aswell, in a +/- 5 or 10 seconds manner.

(weapondps / (armourspawn/minute)) ratio should increase.

No clue what you mean.

and ofc remove randomness from spawn system and spawnrape.

You cant. Quakelive up until 3months ago had the less random spawn system any quake game has ever had. Did it stop spawnraping ? no. On the contrary, it used to completely shut down players because the system was easily predicted and abused. There's a slight bit of "randomness" now ( they just went from 40% further spawns to 50% ) and it helps a lot when you're trying to rack up frags.

It also actually makes the spawnrape cleaner, as you get taken care off nearly instantly instead of running around naked for a few seconds before eating rockets.

Random spawns are actually the most fair spawns you could possibly find, because they are not predictable and can't be forced. If the spawn algorithm has a little twist that diminishes the % of spawning 2-3-4-5 times in a row on the same spawn ( let's enlarge that to that spawn and the 2-3 closest spawns for the sake of it ) it becomes fairly difficult to abuse ( yeah, spam the closest spawn, if the guy spawned there you're gonna spam....the next closest spawn and he only has 33% of the normal chance of spawning there anyway ). Play more quakeworld, you'll be suprised to see how fair it actually feels ( when the server is running ktx or whatever the serverside mod )

only thing in this game that needs fixing to help new players is the spawn system.

you shoudlnt be able to hold off your spawn for 4 seconds, it should be a force spawn immediatly when you die at the furthest point away, they should take away half the spawns and put them in places its impossibl to get spawn raped. all based on where your opponent is, not on the fucking lotto in relation to where you died.

it should be a force spawn immediatly when you die at the furthest point away
that's pretty much how it already is, except that your exact spawn would be predicted every single fucking time and you'd either get raped or denied access to items..

they should take away half the spawns and put them in places its impossibl to get spawn raped
good luck having maps that are actually playable then.

all based on where your opponent is, not on the fucking lotto in relation to where you died
which is already the case. Also makes us go back to the first and second quotes.

I'd appreciate if you retards would actually put some effort in your trolls, at least fake being ignorant and not completely stupid.

dota is a custom map in wc3, other than the same game engine there isnt much similarity. in dota u play 5v5, control 1 hero and no other units, u kill creeps for gold to buy items instead of building workers to mine gold. the list goes on and on.

the blademasters dont have images, neither axe or juggernaut. ofc, u can buy manta. but i included that as an ability.

there are also heroes like enchantress and chen which are played mostly by controlling neutral creepss, and on top of that u can get helm of the dominator which also allows u to take control over neutral creeps. but again, i included these as hero abilities.

so whats the point in a well rounded game setup with what you think are top notch games of each category when the big mass of console generation watchers care a shit about them and refuses to watch. its not the personal interest of any sponsor to loose money to what we think is worthwile but to reach as many people as possible with their investment

500-1000 watchers that stick to their 5€ mouse and play a game that runs perfectly on a 200€ machine + are mostly at an age where they dont fall for "omg it haz blue light it makez me better!" anymore..
vs.
10.000+ watchers that throw their little money out of the window as soon as theres a new shiny device out there that claims to give an edge over your opponent.

... now if you where the company that has designed a product X that is basically the same as Y but costs the double amount and is black instead emitting blue and red light - for wich of those 2 groups mentioned above would you host a tournament and advert your product all over the place?
ya right

and if that means to sponsor games that are basically shit and will die in a year or tournaments with 5 games that hardly differ much (like cs, cs:female and cd:s...) you'll still do it, even if it sucks balls on a non commercial viewpoint

ESWC, I know lets run a WC3 and Dota tournament, O and while were at it may as well run 3 tournaments of the same game (CS).

to be fair dota and wc3 are really big in china so its still a valid option if you wanna focus on that market
and cs and css have a not overlapping community and each of them is bigger than quake while women competitions are done just for marketing reasons obviously

Quake is just not newb friendly..Community is small-only the players that know the game are still playing so if somebody without any experience joins Quake he needs like a week to get a frag lol...
They quit fast cuz ist just stupid to play the game where u die all the time without even getting a weapon.

So basically the only people we can count on are the ones that want to die..multipletimes aswell..

the potential influx of new players is much larger than the current community!!

it isn't the skill ceiling that is the issue, it is the skill gap. therefore, by getting rid of every experienced players by making them hate id and maybe even quake live, it will drive out the current group to be replaced with a new, larger group. this new group will eventually be just like the current one, but it will be larger. with these numbers id will be able to profit from ql and support the game, making the community love them instead of hate them. the long term picture is that it is best for quake if the current community dies.

i mean they have been going as far as to tier slum and not ban hackers and betray community leaders, right?

and if you watch that you know whats so frustrating about the first months of quake. if that was me i'd just ragequit right after the match :> he doesnt do anything wrong hes just waaaaaaay to inexperienced with every of all those aspects

quake needs more ENTHUSIASTS. people who have modded the shit out of q2, q3, and even q4 and carried the quake series to it's legendary status among video games.
We need more promotion, more noob friendly shoutcasts, more content and more day9 like people who will be charismatic, funny and in love with the game.
We need more people who will spread the good word and carry the game to where it once used to be, an internet dispute settling field of honor, a place where you can have fun with your work collegue, a place where you can shit talk some guy from france, a place where you can unwind a hour or so, a place where you can HAVE FUN.

but in order to have all that, we need ID TO GET THEIR THUMBS OUT OF THEIR ASSES AND START LISTENING TO THE COMMUNITY.

ID, YOU ARE NOTHING WITHOUT US. WE MADE YOU.
SO START FUCKING COMMUNICATING WITH YOUR COMMUNITY AND GET TO WORK BEFORE IT'S BEYOND ANY REPARATION.

The clock is ticking and the end is nigh. Come Christmas, ql might as well be just a ghost town with 500 daily players.

and if you count the fact that the trend in quakelive was to remove old maps (ztn pt4 pdm6 cajunas) in favour of less personal involving new maps, which must have been shrinking spectators base even more, then the cycle is fully complete

ya but id keeps reducing the number of tiers and putting everyone together.... They're solely out to make their appear look active at this point (the whole reason they un-resegregated the tiers again this past year). Their priority isn't with the skillmatching system, it's with changing ql's perception...

Personally, it appears they're just trying to hold on till quakecon. We know they're already working on doom 4 so it's not farfetched to think they'll be moving over yet more of ql's resources/manpower to help assist the development of that new title.

if QL is going to do a comeback to the master shows, there must be a change. to bring in TDM or CTF to the stage will make a big different. the duels will not come back to these stages in the form as it is today.

to abandon QL duels maybe will be the best for QL in long terms, i hope so. i love Q3 and QL duels, but in the big shows i can understand that the game is abandoned IF the reason is that there are only a few players playing Q3 or QL in these big events all the time. think of this:
how many different rosters are there for the last 5-7 years if you look at Qcon, DH, ESWC, ESL etc?

Clan arena is the most played mode.... it's amazing that noone has thought about adding it as a competitive option.... CTF doesn't have a big enough playerbase and TDM is obviously fail on arrival... Heck, even FFA is dying.. only thing left is CA really

-Tier 1 should be allowed item respawn timers of major item(s?) they pick up, to get themselves used to timing items period. As their skill increases and they proceed to tier 2 (let's say), the item timer is just part of the time/temporary/only 1 item, etc. By tier 3, no help with timing.

- No tier-slumming Tier 1. Tier 1's should also not be able to join a tier 2 game until they reach a certain skill level- never join a tier 3 game as a player only as spectator.

-Regarding skill levels, introduce DeFrag concept as a movement trainer (since everything in Quake revolves around the movement, unlike other games), with the ability to join games WITH YOUR FRIENDS. Keep track of record times on runs, max speed achieved, etc.

- Players should be able to proceed to the next tier when they achieve a certain % aim overall with weapons (so they dont' have to be good with them all, necessarily), can achieve and sustain a higher movement speed than normal running speed, etc. After tier 2 this becomes more in the gray area.

-Helpful hints like "Switch out weapons depending on range/situation for maximum damage!" (I know this is very situational, but it at least gets the concept in their mind). These hints should come in-game. (I don't even know if this is possible with that engine or not). Make more advanced hints as their skill grows?

-Make stats based on the individual, not compared to every other player in the game to begin with, such as: "In this life you did more damage than your previous best: (X amount)!" "You hit better LG % than you previous best: (X amount)!" Encouragement wouldn't hurt either, or some light taunting in the "Excellent!/Impressive!" voice, just to keep them motivated.

-Introduce ladders and such (which have already been mentioned by almost everyone) and let the player who wants to be competitive pay a subscription to have their stats included in the leaderboards, the option to enter on-site hosted cups, etc ("Premium") instead of segmenting the playerbase into those who can play certain maps and those who can't. Hell, keep the "spawn your own server for x amt more" idea ("Pro" feature?).

we all know this shit, its syncerror and his team doing nothing about it. We need to overthrow his ass, get a bitch fired, the next nigga that comes will either shut us down or listen. Don't give a fuck, need syncerror gone.

BTW who the fuck assassinated arqon? Haven't heard of him in soo fucking long. Rather have his elitist ass in charge, at least he did something with his time other than circle jerk with a bunch of orangutans.

according to the last RUR cast, SOMETHING happened to him... they didn't say it specifically, but they got all hushy about it and said something to the effect of "we'll make a news post about it later" when he was brought up

btw: i like your idea on tooltips. That's something wc3 has built into their game by default. In ql it's non existenent. It would help a lot of noobs out. But doing something like that would require work, work that sync and his team are not willing to do because they're too busy watching competitive vods and mapping rather than deveoloping this game. So ya, maybe in doom 4.

While i never really cared for QL because i think there are more challenging ways to play quake.. its still sad to see how id software wasted a good opportunity to get quake into the limelight again..and even more saddening to see that it got "replaced" by a casual game.

Why do some people keep writing down what features the game should have had in order to keep it alive?
Id software knows this, its just that they did not want to, for whatever reasons. Also, there are like 50 threads regarding that topic, all filled with the same (good) ideas, so why bother to write it down, yet again?

Will be interesting to see how the people on TL.net react when some even more dumbed down game replaces SC2.
Which will, in my opinion, happen.

The reasons are simple. Syncerror is in charge. Anyone who has ever had a conversation with sync, me included, knows how stubborn adam is. He has a very narrow minded take on how ql should be developed. He's been very staunchly opposed to any feedback that differs with his views. Gibs being one of them. This game is/was developed by him. He gave the direction and he is solely to blame for its failure. I just checked id software's job placement page. They're looking for a new manager..... its' ABOUT TIME!!!